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About Us

Welcome to the blog of the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia. With contributions from staff, faculty, students, and visiting researchers, “Notes from Under Grounds” offers glimpses into all aspects of Special Collections here at U.Va.: new acquisitions, instruction, little-known collections, staff projects, exhibitions, special events, and more.

Posts are managed by three staff members: curator David Whitesell shares fresh acquisitions, head of instruction and outreach Petrina Jackson covers visiting courses and student engagement, and curator Molly Schwartzburg fills in the gaps with posts about just about everything else. Please contact us if you would like to write a post, if there’s a subject you want us to cover, or if you’d like to offer general feedback on this blog. Get alerts of new blog posts by subscribing on the blog home page.

If you’re wondering about our blog title, Special Collections is located one floor underground–and here at U.Va., we refer to our campus as “Grounds,” following the practice of Thomas Jefferson.

If you believe we have posted an image for which you are the copyright holder, without permission, please contact us to correct the error.

If you’re wondering about the images that appear in the blog’s header, they all come from items in our collections that have been fully digitized and placed online for public use. All are in the public domain. One of five different headers appears at random each time you visit the blog. To see others, simply refresh the page.

4 thoughts on “About Us”

My professor has asked me to help her look for photographs for her monograph titled “Rebuffing Refugee Journalists: The Profession’s Failure to Help Jews Persecuted by Nazi Germany.” I would like to get permission to use a photo of Oron J. Hale that is featured in this post: https://smallnotes.library.virginia.edu/tag/oron-hale/.

HA! That stands for “Happy Accident” and discovering your wonderful “ground” is just that.
It’s been impossible to locate Nick Curtis (to create a font based on authentic title cards for a Larry Semon silent comedy that is missing some footage–I restore and recreate silent film intertitles), but in the process I discovered “Notes from Under Grounds” and the Small Special Collections Library.
Your website is extremely well-designed in both its aesthetics and its entertaining and enlightening content.
I wish I lived closer than Los Angeles to visit your collection, but I did the next best thing: subscribed to your blog.
As for Nick, what a generous, priceless gift to donate those 300 books in what this old lettering artist considers eye candy!
Thanks for this peek into what Thomas Jefferson would call “Under Grounds.”
(My personal design project features “the ampersand as fun & fabulous art”–amperart-dot-com. Enjoy.)

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